Uturón

Tel'Adrus and the Dungeon of Horrors

Adventure two began with the players pensively floating down the Niagrum river, on their way to Tolactaquatl. They stopped for the night in a town known as Faratl, a large town on the river used as a trading outpost.

After being in the crowded inn for a short period of time, the players received a strange invitation from a man known as Walim Vera – the son of a merchant tycoon and a rich, rich man. He summoned them to his manor, to dine and enjoy some conversation. He, however, was very strange, and introduced himself as a “demonologist.” As the players talked about their earlier encounter with the demons, he was so knowledgeable (about almost everything) that it was disconcerting.
He then made a strange request of the PCs – he was looking for a book, he said, and was willing to pay an awful lot of money to get it. The players, to get the book, would have to sail to Timan and take it from the grave of a paladin. The players, ultimately, did not give him a response, although he offered them 5000 gold pieces apiece (enough so that they would never have to work for the rest of their lives).

They spent the night in Mr. Vera’s guest house, a comfortable little home. However, their sleep was interrupted by a scream in the night. Going to investigate, they found a woman curled up in the fetal position, who had been attacked during the night by something that she described as “shadowy figures.” The players didn’t quite know what to do – until they found out that the priest of Ehlonna in town had lost his powers.

Going to investigate, the players found a trapdoor in the church that the priest claimed no knowledge of. The descended a long way, into what they thought was the dungeon of an old fort. The environment made it extremely difficult to see – red mist and moss everywhere, and pooled water on the floor.

Moving further into the tunnel, they found a boy in one of the prison cells. He was emaciated, and begged them to help him. As they made the attempt, however, a strange noise from behind them made them turn around to face a horrific creature. Looking like a woman so starved and tortured that she was no longer recognizable, it had foot-long blades where its fingers should have been. They tried to do battle with it, but it proved to be beyond their skill – their weapons did not damage it because it was protected by some dark magic. The wizard (Eli) attempted to escape up the way they came, but the other party members ran behind a steel door, which they shut and barred.

The creature chased the wizard. He cast fly, moving quickly up the stairs to the place where the trapdoor exit should have been – except that there was no trapdoor. After attempting several different methods of opening what appeared to be a stone ceiling, he found that he was trapped. The demon had not followed him up the stairs, but was surely waiting below. What could he do?

Meanwhile, the rest of the players (unable to contact the wizard) continued through the dungeon. They found a mausoleum with a desecrated altar to the god Pelor, and a floor filled with water and bones from the surrounding caskets. They found yet another trapdoor, which didn’t appear to belong in the dungeon – moving down, they found stairs that led abruptly to a stone wall.

Frustrated, they went back up the stairs, moving back out into the mausoleum. The gnome noticed something odd – no bones floating in the water. They kept moving, and found that the bones had arranged themselves to spell three fateful words: “NO WAYOUT.”

After becoming extremely scared, the players devised a plan to kill the monster outside – they would build a trap to pull it into the well. After accomplishing this, they pushed another boulder on top of the beast, and celebrated their victory. They were still, they found, trapped.

After finding out that they were suitably screwed, and seeing several macabre messages similar to the one written in bones, they worked their way back down to the trapdoor and the stairs to nothing only to find a black ooze dripping down the walls. They had a conversation with a ghostly voice which echoed up the chamber, and a similar wall in white appeared behind them.

The voice introduced itself as Tel’Adrus, and said that before them was his realm, and behind them was home. He questioned their sincerity, and their courage, and told them they did not even know their foe. After sending the gnome through the dark portal, the white one closed, and they charged onward toward their enemy.

What greeted them on the other side was a strange chamber with three levels floating in space, that repeated itself infinite times. However, if you went down all three leves, you would wind up at the top again – it made for a very interesting combat. Their opponents were Tel’Adrus himself – a human male who had perpetrated killings and ritual cannibalism – and Lippiorn, an immense demon of terrible power. In addition, the presence of Tel’Adrus seemed to cause undead to spawn at random, making anyone left alone a vuenerable target. As the dwarf braved the fight against Lippiorn, the other players tried their best to kill Tel’Adrus, but found him to be an extremely elusive target.

Lippiorn defeated the dwarf, but not to be outdone, he got a second wind and smashed the demon with his axe, killing him and banishing him back to the abyss. This victory paved the way for a victory against Tel’Adrus.

After blacking out, the players woke up in their beds in Vera Manor, unsure if it had all been a dream. But all they had to do to assure themselves that it had indeed been real? Look down at the wounds they had received. It was such that Tel’Adrus was defeated and the town of Faratl was saved from an unknown menace.

Welcome to the Jungle

Session 1 – December 27, 2010

Our very first adventure session began with our players meeting in the town of Emaletl, on the bank of a tributary to the Niagrum river. After spending the night in the local inn (called the Xaun), they began a perilous journey downriver, heading to the jungle metropolis of Tolactaquatl.

Their journey was interrupted when they were assaulted by a huge beast from the water. Flying from the river into the air, the beast capsized their canoe, and they were sent spitting and sputtering into the water. Thousands of smaller creatures jumped from the back of the larger beast into the jungle. Washing up onto the shore, the players found themselves beset on all sides by these spider-like creatures, with 8 legs and two extra appendages that ended in scythe-like blades.

Fighting the creatures off, the characters were stuck. What would they do now? They decided to head downriver, hoping to find their way eastward to the great city. It was slow going, moving through the hot, humid jungle, and they eventually came to an impassable canyon. Several hundred feet deep, with rushing water underneath, they knew that they could not safely cross it. It was then that they saw the bridge, quite a ways down the canyon walls. It had been constructed from solid stone, and led to tunnels on either side. There was a staircase on either side that had their own entrances to the mountain. The players decided this was better than nothing, and so moved down the stairs on their side.

The dark doorway read, in Dwarven, “Welcome to the ”/campaign/uturon/wikis/Halls%20of%20Passage/new" class=“create-wiki-page-link”>Halls of Passage. Here, you will find comfort and shelter." The players took this to be a good sign, and made their way inside, only to find themselves beset by goblins. After fighting off this relatively easy fodder, they slept in the entrance hall.

Moving further into the halls, some gruesome sights greeted the players. The halls had apparently been taken long ago, and the Dwarves destroyed. The characters moved down into the halls, fighting as they went. After three levels of fighting, the players found themselves in the great hall – the massive cave complex that housed “buildings” constructed by the Dwarves. The characters moved about in secret for a short while, before accidentally being spotted (the gnome cast dancing lights, alerting a bunch of hellhounds to their presence).

What ensued was a terrifying chase – a scroll of expeditious retreat that the players had found in Otto’s Magic Shop earlier helped a great deal with this. Running outside, and across the twenty-foot-wide bridge, the players were beset by hellhounds, and a horde of goblins that would have finished them. Torrential rain made footing precarious, and visibility limited. Fortunately, the bridge was old and in a degree of disrepair. A carefully targeted fireball sent a large section careening into the rapids below, and a lot of goblinoids with it. Thankfully, the chase was over, but the adventure was not – the players still had to traverse the second half of the halls.

Using the sewers to pass undetected, the players crept along. They got to the other side of the second great hall, and moved up the stairs. There was a fair amount of infighting among the goblins, which also helped them to sneak by. (The reason for this infighting was never discovered). Moving up the subsequent halls, the PCs encountered little resistance.

Upon reaching the exit, the players found that the rain was too intense for them to leave. So they made camp in the exit halls, and waited.

The players moved out of the halls the following morning, and back into the oppressive humidity of the Niametl jungle. The halls, which had posed so much trouble, were now behind them, and they had made progress toward the city. They encountered an old path, overgrown, which led toward some smoke in the distance. Deciding to take this path, they discovered that their trials were indeed not over. They came upon a town beset by an army of approaching gnolls.

The villagers were more or less holding their own, except that a half-demon gnoll with giant bat wings was tearing them apart in the center. Kodor rushed into combat, and the others soon followed. The after fighting for a little while (and dishing out some major damage), the half-demon flew off, leaving his army to die.

At the end of the fight, the town had been all but decimated. Only four or five villagers remained. The PC’s discovered that the town had been called Thórazu, and that the gnolls that attacked it had been only a smaller branch of a larger horde. There was a much larger branch, they said, headed for a town to the east, known as Lotaq. This was told to them by Kithalya, the hunter.

Not waiting around, the players rushed off to warn the villagers of Lotaq. They arrived successfully, but discovered a small amount of bureaucratic resistance on the part of the mayor. The priest Amartl and the Elven Archer Itiri helped to convince the mayor of his folly, and they asked the PCs to go to a nearby Orc tribe to ask for assistance.

A short while later, the players found themselves speaking to the Orc clan Tooao, and their leader, Chief Da’outo. He was imposing, and the players found the diplomacy more difficult than any fight. Eventually, though, they convinced him that they should fight the gnolls together. After a war dance and painting skulls on the faces of the soldiers, the orcs moved to fight.

The orcs proved to be a very important asset. The players themselves fought not only the same half-demon from before, but yet another half-demon, a cleric. They proved impossibly hard to bring down, and the players certainly had their hands full. Eventually, however, they emerged broken, bloody, but victorious. After a short goodbye, they left once again, headed once and for all to Tolactaquatl.